Telfer: Whether online or in print, it's all about the journalism

Published
2:00 am EST, Sunday, February 13, 2011

A panel discussion titled "Rethinking the News II" at the recent Michigan Press Association annual convention in Detroit offered some hope for those who are worried about the quality of reporting due to readers' shift to online for information.

Tony Dearing, editor of annarbor.com, the online news site that replaced the print product, the Ann Arbor News, said when the website was launched, reporters and editors still were trying to figure out what would be the one thing that would keep people coming back to their site.

"We found it after the launch," he said. "We found it and it was good journalism. We have a very large, very persistent audience driven by our journalism."

Some have complained that the shift to online has been accompanied by a shift in the quality of information reported, with an overemphasis on entertainment news and news of the weird and wacky. Dearing said while those types of stories will draw traffic, it is solid journalism that brings people back again and again.

In Ann Arbor, sports and crime stories are the two biggest drivers of reader traffic. Those two areas are popular at the Midland Daily News website, ourMidland.com, too. So are obituaries and local news coverage, particularly breaking news and stories that touch the lives of readers.

Dearing was joined on the panel by others from the newspaper industry, including representatives from the Detroit Media Partnership serving the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, the Petoskey News Review, and representatives from various academic institutions in Michigan. While all offered their thoughts on what direction the news gathering business should be heading, Dearing's views had the greatest impact on the audience.

He advocated measuring what people are reading through online statistics and focusing on those types of stories.

"Don't waste your time on the 30 percent of the stories that no one is reading," he said. "We might have lost 30 percent of our reporting power, but if we take the remaining resources we have and focus on the 70 percent of stories that people are reading, it's a wash."

With information immediately available today, Dearing said it is important for journalists to report what they know, and link to other sites if they have information that a reporter has not been able to confirm. He used the recent firing of University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez as an example. A Detroit area television station began reporting Rodriguez had been fired, but the annarbor.com's sources were saying that was not true. So annarbor.com continued to report the coach was not fired and linked its story to the television station's story, explaining that it could not verify that report.

Dearing said his staff took flak from readers who accused annarbor.com of getting scooped by a competitor, but in the end the annarbor.com story proved to be accurate. Rodriguez was not fired until the next day.

"You have to report what you know the second you know it, but you also have to aggregate to other sites if it is in dispute from what your sources are saying," he said.

His last piece of wisdom was his best and a fitting end to the panel discussion. He said this of readers:

"It's not your job to want what we give you, it is our job to give you what you want."

John "Jack" Telfer, editor of the Daily News, went to college with Dearing at Central Michigan University in the late 1970s. Dearing and Telfer worked at CMLife, with Dearing at one point serving as editor of the college newspaper.